The doors of God they have locked with keys of creed

And shut out by the Law his tireless Grace.

(Savitri, p. 225)

 

The Revolt of Reason

The idea of the Transcendence that lies at the heart of religion and spirituality is justified either by an infra-rational belief or a supra-rational intuition. Between the two stretches the realm of reason. Belief accepts unquestionably; reason doubts, questions and denies that which it cannot logically justify. In the upward evolution of mankind reason is at first a help; for it shows the inanity of the conventional dogmas, traditions, cults and the authority of the letter of some ancient book, śāstra,  priests, theologians and theocrats. Reason refuses to accept these without enquiry, test and proof. When the rational man is confronted by the supposed divine authority he finds no arguments that would justify the claim. He declares the truth as reason sees it and discards religious belief as superstition that should be rooted out if mankind wants to discover the truth of itself and the world.

 

The revolt of reason leads inevitably to atheism. This revolt is not new. In ancient India the rational investigation of the transcendence, ideas like that of Karma, reincarnation, after-life, heaven and hell, of the immortality of the soul and of religious cults, sacrifices, food-offerings to the departed souls were tested by reason. These rationalistic thinkers, cārvāka, came to the conclusion that there was no rational foundation for these beliefs and deeds. They were vehement and abusive in their denunciation of the Vedic ritualism. The authors of all the Vedas, they said, were hypocrites and guileful fiends (bhaņda-dhūrta-niśācarāh). And like the rational materialists they held that there was only gross matter—earth, air, fire, water. What we call ‘consciousness’ emerges from these four elements: caturbhýah khalu bhūtebhyaś caitanyam upajāyate. They argued that if the food offered to the departed in the funeral rite (śràddha) is eaten by the dead, then there is no need of giving provisions to those who go on a journey.  This implies the absurd idea that it would be enough to serve food at home to appease the hunger of those who were far away.

 

In Europe there has been atheist thinking long before the modern scientific atheism, in the Graeco-Roman culture. The Epicureans rejected the myths of the gods. Later, the Roman philosopher and poet Lucretius (96?-55 BC) showed us how religions prompt men to evil deeds. He heldd that there were no immortal souls: “minds and light souls of all that live/ Have mortal birth and death.” [1]

 

Lucretius, like a true materialist, argued that only matter was real, a thing existent, and everything that is in the world is made up of material atoms. Spirit being non-material is non-existent. He argued that nothing could be created out of nothing. What is not matter is nothing. The belief in the Spirit arises from the fear that ignorant people have of some physical phenomena they cannot explain, like the thunder and the lightning; so they imagine supernatural powers at work.

 

Lucretius  writes:

 

Fear holds dominion over mortality

Only because, seeing in land and sky

So much the cause whereof no wise they know

Men think Divinities are working there.

Meanwhile, when once we know from nothing still

Nothing can be created, we shall divine

More clearly what we seek: those elements

From which alone all things created are,

And how accomplished by no tools of Gods. [2]

 

The modern materialism uses the same kind of reasoning to disprove the non-existence of a transcendental Being. Even after the denial of God there remains the anthropological and sociological phenomenon of religion which has exerted through centuries, and exerts even today, sometimes a creative, sometimes a destructive influence on human life and culture, and on art and politics. Reason tries to understand the cause of religious persistence. In this situation reason reacts generally in two different ways. The extreme view is that religion is superstitious belief and absurd rituals of the non-rational unscientific mind.

 

Seeing how persistent some of the erroneous beliefs are, regarding things of nature, held by the irrational uncritical minds on the ground that these are enunciated in some holy book, we can understand the impatience of the rationalists. Even today in the West there are influential, learned men and women, from almost all walks of life, who reject the theory of evolution as false and cling to the creationist idea of the Bible, namely that God created some four thousand years ago, the world and everything that is, all creatures and plants, men and women in six days out of nothing. Moreover the misdeeds against humanity that people have perpetrated in the name of religion—persecution, torture, massacre of innocent men, women and children, the witch-hunting, Inquisition, the devastating wars of religion are sufficient justification for the rational mind to reject religions in all their modes and manifestations. Even in India where religious tolerance was a deep-rooted cultural trait, religious abuses were not altogether absent: higher caste people found religious and karmic justification for marginalizing and ill-treating the lower caste people, men found religious justification for denying equal rights to women.

 

“Men everywhere,” Sri Aurobindo writes, “have common human failings, and intolerance and narrowness especially in the matter of observances there has been and is in India. There has been much violence of theological disputation, there have been querulous bickerings of sects with their pretensions to spiritual superiority and greater knowledge and sometimes, at one time especially in southern India in a period of acute religious differences, there have been brief local outbreaks of active mutual tyranny and persecution even unto death.” [3]

 

Strife, infliction of suffering, fanaticism and other crimes committed ‘religiously’ are justification enough for the whole-sale condemnation of all things religious. Yet sometimes reason takes a more moderate view: religion is a by-product of evolution, it has a survival value. Humans have lost the natural instinct that helps lower animals to survive. Therefore we depend greatly on the experiences of previous generations handed down to us. This is an important part of education. Children are told not to put their fingers in the flame. Most accept this injunction without question and never venture to experiment. They are told not to go to places where there may be poisonous snakes and ferocious tigers. Such lessons and warnings are useful for the survival of children. Here the lesson taught comes from the fatal experience of some. There are other dangers of which the cause is not so easily grasped: for example, death by a lightning stroke. In such cases the tribal elders, not knowing how to deal with the situation, imagined a supernatural Being and his anger. So, in order to be spared such fate, people were asked to bring offering to the unknown Being and pray to him. This teaching was registered by the pre-scientific brain, like the child’s, and people falsely believed that in thunderstorm the worshippers would be spared. Although the belief is false it is similar to the survival value of the child. It is thus argued that religion is a by-product of the evolutionary truth of survival. If such is its origin, the rational man should have nothing to do with religion. [4]

 

Another moderate view is that religion, even though false, has had and may still have a civilizing effect, can teach men to act morally. In that case it has to be purged of everything irrational, i.e. everything that reason cannot uphold. Mystical experiences and superstitions are thrown on the same junk-yard. However it does not reject the words ‘religion’ and ‘God’. In Europe such an idea took root in the Renaissance and became a full-fledged theory in the Enlightenment. What was proposed was a religion not contradicted by reason: Spinoza equated God completely with Nature. The word ‘God’ was retained but there was nothing that, in any way, transcended the universal nature. A religion based on such a God—no priesthood, no rituals, also no mysticism—would be the ‘true religion’. Speaking of Spinoza, Matthew Arnold wrote: “But the multitude, which respects only what astonishes, terrifies, and overwhelms it, by no means takes this simple view of its own religion. To the multitude, religion seems imposing only when it is subversive to reason, confirmed by miracles, conveyed in documents materially sacred and infallible, and dooming to damnation all without its pale.” [5]

 

A rationalistic religion, like that of Spinoza, could not be called ‘theism’. It was called ‘deism’. The Church has always rejected deism and has equated it with atheism. The rational approach to the problems of humanity, not religious practices, was responsible for introducing some of the human values such as equal rights for all, freedom of speech and action, social and political justice, etc. “… when humanity,” Sri Aurobindo writes, “got rid of much that was cruel, evil, ignorant, dark, odious, not by the power of religion, but by the power of the awakened intelligence and of human idealism and sympathy this predominance  of religion has been violently attacked and rejected...” [6] The revolt of reason, in the modern times, started in Europe during the Renaissance and attained its most systematic formulation in the Enlightenment. Today science and reason appeal constantly to the Enlightenment for the vindication of its approach to life and religion.

 

The defects and aberrations of religious beliefs, and actions prompted by those beliefs, are undeniable. Reason and atheism are necessary for the elimination of religionist errors so that the real truth behind the persistent religious instinct in man, the spiritual aspiration, may rise above his natural ignorance and incapacity and get the chance to express itself in the individual and in the society. The religious fervour in the past, generally lacking the clear intellectual discrimination, has caused immense harm and has retarded the spiritual progress of mankind.  Atheism is often “a necessary passage to deeper religious and spiritual truth.” [7] It is, Sri Aurobindo aphoristically says, “the shadow or dark side of the highest perception of God.” [8] Religionists wanting to give form to that which is formless and all forms, and which it is impossible to hold in limited mental formulas and make crude representations. Atheism is the hammer of truth that strikes at such representations and destroys them. But reason does not have the insight to recognize the truth that lies behind and inside the shattered formulas.

 

To the discerning eye, however, the truth reveals itself. “Religious forms and systems,” Sri Aurobindo writes, “become effete and corrupt and have to be destroyed, or when they lose much of their inner sense and become clouded in knowledge and injurious in practice, and in destroying what is effete or in negating aberrations reason has played an important part in religious history.” [9]

 

The root of evil that reason tries to pull out does not lie in the true spiritual aspiration which is the essence of religion, but in the confusion of religion with creed, cult, sectarianism and religious organizations. The one thing that is needful in religion is its spiritual essence. Unfortunately the essence was lost sight of and Religion became a ruthless tyrant. Sri Aurobindo gives a vivid description of the city of Ignorance in which Religion reigns. In that city,

 

There was no altar raised to Liberty,

True freedom was abhorred and hunted down;

Harmony and tolerance nowhere could be seen.

 

And there were warring groups fighting for their sectarian gods:

 

…A zealot’s fervour pushed their ruthless cults

All faith not theirs bled scourged as heresy;

They questioned, captived, tortured, burnt and smote

And forced the soul to abandon right, or die.

Amid her clashing creeds and warring sects

Religion sat upon a blood-stained throne. [10]

If such is the picture of religion where is the hope of the spiritual evolution of men? Reason and science criticize vehemently the tyranny of religion but they cannot give a meaning to the evolving life, and to the world-existence. We live in a world in which we see no sense, no value. We do not see life’s spiritual base or its divine destiny. Existence appears nightmarish. Some accept it with resignation; others desperately seek a sense that would make existence bearable, if not meaningful.

 

Only religion in this bankruptcy

Presents its dubious riches to our hearts

Or signs unprovisioned cheques on the Beyond. [11]

 

But we should not, like the staunch atheist, be blind to the true spirit that lies behind the religious instinct. There is something in us that “seeks to live in the spirit, in what is beyond the intellect, beyond the aesthetic and ethical and practical being of man, and to inform and govern these members of our being by the higher light and law of the spirit.” [12]

 

 

[1] On the Nature of Things, III, lines 418-9. Tr. William Ellery Leonard

[2] Ibid., I. lines 152-160

[3] The Foundations of Indian Culture, pp. 129-30. See also Amartya Sen: India: Large and Small in the collection of his essays, The Argumentative Indian, London etc, Penguin, 2005, for the more recent intolerant Hindutva movement.)

[4] For the development of the idea of religion as by-product, see: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, London, 2007, pp. 200-08)

[5] Matthew Arnold,  Spinoza and the Bible in: Essays in Criticism, First Series, London 1903, p. 321

[6] The Human Cycle, p. 163

[7] Ibid., p.215

[8] Thoughts and Aphorisms, Vol. 17, p. 146

[9] The Human Cycle, p. 124

[10] Savitri, pp. 209-10

[11] Ibid., p. 167

[12] The Human Cycle, p. 166